NEÏL BELOUFA HUMANITIES
September 14 — November 10, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14, 2024, 4pm — 7pm
Artist Talk: 4pm

About the exhibition
Neïl Beloufa is an artist whose polymorphous practice spans film, sculpture, installations, as well as social and collective experiments. In a constant flirtation with failure, his work insistently interrogates the art field–its institutions and formats, its capacities and limitations–while also now exploring the digital world and the novel forms of community that coalesce there. For this exhibition, Beloufa considers the power of individual storytelling in building large-scale propaganda through Growth (2024) a newly commissioned installation. While riffing on the gamification of society and the trend of immersive art experiences, Growth is an interactive multimedia system that guides each visitor through the process of becoming the center of their own success story, creating a company, a cult, or a political party and thus highlighting the incongruous likeness between those. The new commission is presented in conjunction with Beloufa’s existing piece Global Agreement (2018) which examines modern warfare discourse through the vantage point of its direct personnel since Beloufa conducted lengthy interviews with soldiers stationed around the world, extracting from their testimonies a characterization of war that resists accounts from Hollywood or the army itself. The two pieces merge in a dialogue (or cacophony) which uncannily reflects our current moment’s tension between extreme individualism and global discord.

Curated by Myriam Ben Salah.

Humanities is presented in conjunction with a related project at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, October 4, 2024–January 19, 2025.

Additional support for Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition provided by France Chicago Center at the University of Chicago and Villa Albertine Chicago. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Visit renaissancesociety.org for more information.